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I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

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Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#131

Post by squigz »

lawgimenez wrote: post #75

Back in the day me and my friends would also trade cassettes and CDs for a week because buying one costs a lot of money for broke teenagers like us. Hey I just bought this new Dead Kennedys tape I would love to trade for your NOFX CD! Kids nowadays just take for granted music and it makes me kinda sad.

> Kids nowadays just take for granted music and it makes me kinda sad.

Maybe it's better to say they take their easy access to music for granted, which I think is okay. Isn't it better than not having access - or having very very limited access - because they're also broke teenagers?

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#132

Post by jordanf »

reboot81 wrote: post #126

Was thinking of a way to recreate MTV for my daugther, for the same reason - to explore and discover outside the algo bubble on social media.

recreating MTV or a mid-90s alt-rock radio station for our kids would be a really fun little project.

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#133

Post by jordanf »

Rhinobird wrote: post #72
housebear wrote: post #39

Love this. What are you tapping the cards onto ? What is reading that info and then pulling the music? (I'm not super savvy and can't figure it out from the writeup).

I just assumed they were tapping them on their phone and had some kind of app, or website something

no middleware/app needed. PlexAmp can deep-link to an album with an autoplay parameter, as long as the device with the NFC reader can access it.

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#134

Post by jordanf »

Nursie wrote: post #85

It's an interesting toy, but I wonder if this isn't someone trying to hold back the tides of modernity by making their kids appreciate music the way they did. AFAICT most of the old musical tribes we used to arrange ourselves into are a bit of a thing of the past (punks/goths/greebos/grunge/indie kids/ravers/etc), and kids don't build their identities around music taste any more, because music is no longer so much of…

Hi, I'm the "someone". It's me trying to have fun and do something special for my kids, hoping to find more shared connection with them.

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#135

Post by jordanf »

doug_durham wrote: post #58

Seems like an excuse to play with NFC tags. These types of articles come off as sanctimonious. There is nothing superior about the cards. On a phone or computer you can get complete liner notes for any song. All of that is missing from this system. You don't need to justify working on a pet project. Just do it. It doesn't have to be "superior". It's ok if it's dumb.

Thanks for your vapid and misguided feedback, Doug Durham. I hope you find joy somewhere.

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#137

Post by andai »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #107

I feel something the same but actually feel the CD and records generations missed out on a lot as well, not that music was a formless thing but that it was disembodied, appearing from plastic discs and dumb speakers. With my daughter I'm trying to just have much more music in the house, instruments laying around, singing and teaching her traditional songs and making them up together. I don't really worry about her no…

The next phase of this process is that generations which will experience music telepathically will be extremely nostalgic for music perceived by means of vibrating the air in the living room.

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#138

Post by RileyJames »

vitorbaptistaa wrote: post #33

I love this! I prefer digital stuff (less things to worry about), but I miss the physicality, especially when friends come over. Books or CDs become a conversation. If you'd like to do something similar, but don't want to DIY it, check out Yoto Player [1]. This is a small music speaker and they sell a bunch of NFC cards to "play" them. You can also buy blank cards and use their app to add whatever you want to them (m…

+1 for a yoto.

It also led to my biggest ‘Doh’ moment with tech.

My sister showed it to me at a holiday house where we had no internet. I thought it was awesome, an offline music/audio player that her daughter could use. She mentioned you could make your own cards. It immediately reminded me of making mix tape cassettes and cds as a child.

I bought one the next week without doing any further research.

When it arrived and asked me to connect it to the wifi I was very confused.

I realised I made a massive assumption that “someone had solved the NFC card memory capacity problem”. I’d seen it work without internet and made all these assumptions about how it worked.

Obviously wrong in hindsight.

Still a great piece of kit, but I’d love something that was more akin to a cassette players rec/play/rewind/rec & Physical medium.

But portable cassette recorders still exist…

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#139

Post by jphastings »

RileyJames wrote: post #138
vitorbaptistaa wrote: post #33

I love this! I prefer digital stuff (less things to worry about), but I miss the physicality, especially when friends come over. Books or CDs become a conversation. If you'd like to do something similar, but don't want to DIY it, check out Yoto Player [1]. This is a small music speaker and they sell a bunch of NFC cards to "play" them. You can also buy blank cards and use their app to add whatever you want to them (m…

+1 for a yoto. It also led to my biggest ‘Doh’ moment with tech. My sister showed it to me at a holiday house where we had no internet. I thought it was awesome, an offline music/audio player that her daughter could use. She mentioned you could make your own cards. It immediately reminded me of making mix tape cassettes and cds as a child. I bought one the next week without doing any further research. When it arrived…

They’re a fantastic piece of kit! They have a Micro SD card internally and download the album/card on first use, then it can be used fully offline any time in the future. It’s a great trade off in my mind (though I’ll post one level up about how I wish it’d do even better here…)

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#140

Post by jphastings »

vitorbaptistaa wrote: post #33

I love this! I prefer digital stuff (less things to worry about), but I miss the physicality, especially when friends come over. Books or CDs become a conversation. If you'd like to do something similar, but don't want to DIY it, check out Yoto Player [1]. This is a small music speaker and they sell a bunch of NFC cards to "play" them. You can also buy blank cards and use their app to add whatever you want to them (m…

I pulled apart my Yoto mini! I found an unencrypted ESP32, and managed to pull the firmware off it too.

My reverse engineering skills are limited, so my journey has paused there for now, but I would _love_ to be able to map out all the hardware & write open source firmware for it.

The Yoto set up is very smart (the NFC cards hold a Yoto URL, which responds with a JSON document describing the music & links to MP3s on S3, or m3u files for internet radio).

The only downside is that the Yoto will _only_ follow what I presume are allow-listed URLs, and has SSL certs for those URLs baked in, so if the company ever goes under the devices would lose almost all functionality, without new firmware.

I want to support Yoto as these devices are really great, but I’d also love to be able to drop my own URLs on cards and: - Play tracks from Plex like OP - Trigger lighting/mood changes with HomeAssistant as well as play an album - Play the music on network speakers (eg. Sonos), using the Yoto as the source

If anyone feels like they’d be interested in helping reverse engineer them, do reply!

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